Japan’s Next Pop Idol is a Robot?

Standing on a stage in front of a microphone, the singer closes her eyes, takes a breath before letting loose with a love ballad. Her head bobs to the music as she extends her arms to the audience.

Daisuke Wakabayashi/The Wall Street Journal

Rocking the mic at CEATEC: The Cybernetic Human HRP-4C, a humanoid being developed at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

But this is no lounge act. It’s a demonstration of a new humanoid being developed at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. The Cybernetic Human HRP-4C, a youngish-looking girl robot dressed like Lara Croft in a stormtrooper outfit, analyzes a song and then replicates it in its own voice by breaking down the various notes. It even replicates the sound of a human crooner drawing a breath before singing in a natural-sounding voice that sounds eerily like the nasally tone of more than one Japanese pop idol singer.

The display was one of many robots on exhibit at this week’s Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies, also known as CEATEC, in the outskirts of Tokyo.

Not only does the HRP-4C copy the vocal patterns of a human singer, she also mimics the gestures. Using a camera, the robot breaks down the minute movements of a person– the squinting of the eyes, the opening of the mouth and the tilting of the head — and then learns the actions so it can do it on its own.

Masataka Goto, a researcher on the project, said the obvious applications for the robot are in the entertainment industry. However, Mr. Goto noted that this is one of many steps that humanoids must take in order to be able to mimic humans in a natural way.

“Until that happens, robots can not really be self-reliant,” said Mr. Goto.

He said it takes the robot between 10 minutes and an hour to learn to sing a 5-minute song, although learning the gestures to go along with the song can take half a day.

This is not the HRP-4C’s debut — she played CEATEC last year. Mr. Goto says, however, her gestures are much more natural and she has learned the songs on her own this year. Last year, she pulled a Milli Vanilli since the engineers had to program her singing.

On Tuesday, during one demonstration of her singing ability, the engineers opened the curtain but the robot didn’t utter a note. She stood frozen before the researchers hurriedly closed the curtain and said they needed to make some “adjustments.” Maybe even humanoids get stage fright.